In the first of a two-part series, Eugene Daly looks at the factors that instigated the diminishment of our native tongue in Ireland.
The mortal wounds of Gaelic Ireland were inflicted at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, but the death agony was prolonged for all of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth and nineteenth in parts of the country.
The coming of the Anglo-Norman adventurers in the period 1169-1333 with their foreign language and their superior military might was to have a significant effect upon the fortunes of the Irish language, not because of any lasting damage they could inflict upon the Irish nation as a whole but because their persisting presence in the Pale meant that Ireland’s integrity as a country was compromised The descendants of the ‘Gall’, as the native Irish called the foreigners, may have become ‘Hibernians ipsis hiberniores’ (more Irish than the Irish themselves) but they represented a kind of colonial option which the Tudors and later dynasties were to take up. An edict of Henry VIII in 1542, after he had been proclaimed King of Ireland, made the first formal pronouncement about the Irish language since the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) had attempted to prevent the greater Gaelicisation of the English colony. It enacted that ‘ the King’s true subjects, inhabiting this land of Ireland…shall use and speak commonly the English tongue and language’.
It was during the reign of Elizabeth I that the power of the Anglo-Irish earldoms was effectively destroyed and, with the so-called Flight of the Earls in 1607, Ulster, the last outpost of Gaelic civilisation, was left virtually leaderless. The poets, who had attached themselves to the Old Irish Chieftains and then the Anglo-Irish lords, were conscious that a cataclysmic change had come upon their world. By 1704 the native Irish owned only 14 per cent of the land of their own country. Such poets as Dáibhí Ó Bruadai (1625-1698) and Aogán Ó Rathaille (1675-1729) have left bitter attacks on the ‘lowts’ (as it seemed to them) who replaced the old aristocracy, ‘who spread the grey wing upon every tide’ after Limerick. The Bardic Schools were closed and then, in turn, the Courts of Poetry, which succeeded them. One large body of material known as Filíocht na nDaoine (Poetry of the People) consisted of anonymous folksong and poetry, often of great beauty and far from primitive. Much of it took the form of love songs and it bridged the dark years and provided a portable literature for those who had no other.
The songs stopped; as Sir George Petrie (1789-1866), the archaeologist put it in one of the most chilling remarks about the Great Famine of the 1840’s; the people had forgotten how to sing. By then, too, the language had lost its intellectual position; it was no longer the speech of those with power, wealth or influence. As Maureen Wall puts it in her 1906 Thomas Davis lecture ‘The Decline of the Irish Language’: ‘The Irish language had been banished from parliament, from the courts of law, from town and country government, from the civil service and from the upper levels of commercial life’.
As Gerald O’Brien shows in his essay ‘The Strange Death of the Irish Language’, (1780-1800) published in 1989, the last two decades of the 18th century were crucial in the determination of whether the decline should be serious or virtually terminal. A combination of the following factors all but finished Irish as anything other than a ‘provincial patois’; the growth of urbanisation; improvements in communications and the exposure to outside influences of what had been closed and self-sufficient monoglot communities; increased bourgeois prosperity and consequent Anglicisation among some native speakers; the Catholic Church’s decision to opt for general Anglicisation with no provision for Irish in the new seminary in Maynooth (established in 1796); the attention of the antiquarians who wished to preserve Irish as a fascinating relic; the association of spoken Irish with ‘drunkenness, idleness and improvidence’, and a lack of respectability about having any knowledge of it; the need for access to English as the language of contracts and other legal documents; the apolitical nature of Irish society, which diminished the need for the solidarity of a shared and exclusive language; the requirement of English for a whole range of public sector employment and in the armed forces; and as the century turned, the implicit (specific in the case of Daniel O’Connell) suggestion of the country’s new political leaders that lack of English was somehow a bar to political and and material progress.
O’Connell used Irish when it suited him, but as he wrote to his friend, W.J. O’Neill Daunt, – ‘Therefore although the Irish language is connected with many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior quality of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish’. Yet at the height of O’Connell’s influence the population of Irish speakers was at least two million, about 30 per cent of the population. By then, with the system of National Schools (established 1831) where English was the only medium of education in place and the strong support for Anglicisation among parents, mostly for utilitarian motives meant that the Irish speaking population steadily diminished. The effects of the Great Famine and the mass emigration which followed, mostly from what had been mainly Irish-speaking areas, meant that by 1891, Irish speakers numbered no more than 680,000.
A group of supporters of O’Connell, who became known as ‘The Young Irishmen’ differed strongly with O’Connell about his attitude to the use of arms and to his attitude to the Irish language. The brightest star, Thomas Davis (1814-1845) wrote ‘to lose your native tongue and to learn that of an alien is the worse badge of conquest – it is the chain of the soul.
To have lost entirely the national language is death; the fetter has worn through’.
